The Quest for Anna Klein

“Wouldn’t you like to see where I live?”

In anyone else, the question might have been fraught with romantic tension, but coming from Anna it seemed only a closer adherence to Clayton’s suggestion that they be together in more intimate settings.

“All right,” Danforth said. “I’ll call for a taxi.”

“No,” Anna said immediately. “Let’s take the bus.”

And so they did, a long ride down Fifth Avenue, past Saks’ lighted windows filled with the clothes of the coming summer season, brightly colored bathing suits and leisurewear, the loose-fitting garb of the city’s moneyed class. The clothing would be bought and bundled up and taken out to the Hamptons or Fire Island or, farther still, Wellfleet or Martha’s Vineyard, the looming war in Europe causing the only change in this yearly migration, Paris and Rome abruptly no longer on the itinerary.

Below Thirty-fourth Street, the avenue darkened as they entered a landscape of closed shops, small and unlighted, the purveyors of cheap clothes and costume jewelry already home with their families in Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx and whose absence drained some unmistakably vital energy from the city.

The bus moved steadily southward, these same modest shops now giving way to a line of brick walkups and finally to the huddled streets of the Lower East Side.

Night had fallen by then, but if there was safety in numbers, these streets were the safest in New York. For here, the people resided in close quarters, the spaciousness of the outer boroughs still unavailable to them. And so they lived stacked above tailor shops and bakeries and small groceries. Here, in the evening, they crowded the concrete stoops and spoke to one another in old-country tongues and dressed in clothes that seemed to be handed down not from older sibling to younger but from one generation to the next.

Anna appeared as comfortable in the human current of these streets as a dolphin in the sea. Here all the world knew her and greeted her, and on the way to her apartment, she stopped many times to inquire if this child was still sick or that brother still in some far town.

On each of these stops, she introduced Danforth as her employer, then went on to speak awhile before motioning him down the street. During these intervals, Danforth stood, alien and aloof, waiting, sometimes impatiently, to move on and even slightly offended that Anna appeared either oblivious or indifferent to the odd position in which she had placed him.

The entrance to her building was over a shop whose metal staircase was covered in signs with Hebrew lettering. The shop window was filled with a curious array of objects, none of which Danforth recognized, save for the peculiar candelabrum the Jews called a menorah and that he knew they lit only for some holiday. Fringed prayer shawls were displayed on shelves, along with what appeared to be matching cases, and these too had Hebrew lettering. There was also a small table covered with silver-plated and ceramic chalices of various sizes. The entire display struck Danforth as typical of the Ostjuden, whose superstitions his father had often derided and whose tradesmen he’d scornfully dismissed as peddlers.

“I live on the fourth floor,” Anna said as they entered the lobby of the building.

From his first step up the stairs, Danforth was aware of the odors that engulfed and swirled around him. They were flat and heavy, and they gave an oily feel to the air. He’d smelled similar food in the street stalls of the Jewish quarter in Warsaw but had never eaten anything sold there. “And they call what we eat treif,” his father had said contemptuously, and with a quickening step, he’d hustled him back toward the far more stylish eateries of the city.

“It’s really not such a difficult climb,” Anna said when they reached the fourth-floor landing.

“Not at all,” Danforth told her, though he found it necessary to disguise his slightly labored breathing.

Anna swung open the door of her apartment, stepped inside, and turned on the light.

The light revealed a room that surprised Danforth considerably more than anything Anna had said or done since he’d met her. For although located in what had seemed to him a sea of Eastern European Jewishness, her apartment revealed none of the ritual objects sold in the shop below, nothing to suggest anything but a secular life.

“How long have you lived here?” he asked.

“A long time,” she answered.

He walked over to the window that looked out on the noisy street below, a teeming world that reminded him more of Calcutta than New York.

“Please, sit down,” she said.

He lowered himself into one of the plain wooden chairs and glanced at the small table to his right, where a lamp rested on a rectangle of cloth whose weave Danforth immediately noticed.

“The mat,” he said. “I saw some that looked very much like it in Istanbul. They make carpets with the same weave. They last forever, but people here don’t like the way the colors aren’t uniform.” He shrugged. “Handmade objects aren’t perfect, and customers like perfection.”

She offered no response to this but instead turned and disappeared into the tiny kitchen. He couldn’t see her at work, but he had no trouble hearing the clatter of pans and plates as she made dinner.

While she worked, Danforth surveyed the room, noting its spare furniture, all of which might easily have been rescued from the street. There was a table large enough for two, a few chairs, a small desk, a bookshelf bulging with old books, most with cracked spines, which she’d probably bought in one of the many used-book stores that lined Fourth Avenue below Fourteenth Street. It was a hand-me-down decor, every object bearing signs of long use, nicks and scratches, even an odd burn where someone years before had let a cigarette slip from the ashtray to char a wooden surface. Even so, he found that he couldn’t say for certain whether she’d furnished her quarters with such worn-out furniture because she didn’t have the money to buy anything new or out of some strange attraction to the broken and the wobbly, things cast aside or left for junk.

But it was the map that drew Danforth’s attention. It was spread out over the table near him, a map of Europe with small marks along the southern coast of France. Dark lines moved along the roads and rivers of this map, and near these lines there were yet more dots, some with notations. Some of these notations were in French, some in Spanish, some in German, and there were others he couldn’t read, though he recognized the letters as Cyrillic.

“You speak Russian?” Danforth called to her.